The Ships of Literature

When I wrote last, I pretty clearly placed literature above the level of genre fiction. That might be a little harsh. It's likely to offend fans of weird fiction, science fiction, horror, and so on. It might sound a little snobbish, too. People read for lots of different reasons. Every one is a good one, I think, unless you're reading a book on how to murder your spouse. Fans of genre fiction read for entertainment and escape, but the same can be said of those who read more nearly literary works. We read to escape from our own lives and to learn about the lives of others, to encounter them in the times and places in which they have lived. In that way, every book is a fantasy, and all reading an adventure. How many bookplates and library posters have you seen in which a book is compared to a sailing ship? That ship takes us away from our own lives and homes and countries, even to the other side of the world. Although there are literary novels of adventure, we think of adventure as a type of genre fiction. So maybe every good book is a type of fantasy, a story of adventure, something that takes us away and allows us to escape from our own lives, if only for a while. Remember that the first pulp magazine, a magazine of all fiction, was called The Argosy and was named after a ship of adventure.

None of that takes away from the fact that genre fiction, especially weird fiction, horror, science fiction, and even detective stories, are very often done in poor taste. Fiction of this type can be extremely and gratuitously violent, bloody, and gory. Too many readers seem to like it that way. They seem to seek out and actually enjoy bloody horrors. There is also a lot of salacious writing in these genres. Readers seem to seek out that kind of thing, too. And beyond that, there is the simple crime of just plain bad writing. Fans and scholars of genre fiction want their subject matter to be elevated to the level of literature and art, but you can't have it both ways. It can't be good if it's bad. It can't be considered at a high level if it exists at a low one. People love H.P. Lovecraft. His writing has received a fair amount of scholarly attention. Even Leslie Fiedler mentioned Lovecraft in his book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). But none of that changes the fact that Lovecraft was guilty of some pretty bad writing. And he's at the top of the heap. What must be below him? Anyway, if you're going to defend genre fiction as being good or in good taste, you might be forced into the same situation as William Gaines, who said before Congress that a comic book cover showing a man holding a woman's severed head was in fact in good taste.

Speaking of Lovecraft, a few years ago, I read a book called Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff (2016). I meant to write about it at the time. I still might. There are lots of literary and other kinds of offenses in Mr. Ruff's novel. I won't go into that right now. I'll just say that within ten minutes of finishing it, I began reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003), and I found more good writing on the first page or two of Ms. Atwood's novel than in all of Lovecraft Country. Although Margaret Atwood derides science fiction as "talking squids in outer space" (she's looking at you, Admiral Ackbar!), Oryx and Crake is science fictional, for it is both dystopian and post-apocalyptic. But as a literary work, it exists at a higher level than things like Lovecraft Country. And I'm afraid that an excerpt from Lovecraft Country would fit right in with the current Weird Tales. Anything Margaret Atwood writes might not, as she understands (I think) that only a woman can be a woman. That's not a popular opinion in popular fiction or our current popular culture.

This is not to say that what is called literature is necessarily good, or better, or more enjoyable, or written at a higher level than is genre fiction. It's also not to say that what is called literature cannot be bloody, violent, salacious, and so on. Not long ago, I read a novel called Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess (1966). On its surface, Tremor of Intent is a spy novel, or a type of genre fiction, but I think Burgess had a more serious intent in writing it. (The American first edition was subtitled "An Eschatological Spy Novel.") Tremor of Intent is literary: I think Anthony Burgess was a good writer with a high purpose. Nonetheless, it has one of the most gruesome scenes I have ever read in a novel of any kind, so gruesome as to be fascinating in its gruesomeness. The point is that just because a work is considered literary doesn't mean that it does not also have things in common with genre fiction. The opposite can be true, too.

Anthony Burgess was a near contemporary of John Osborne, who wrote, among other things, Look Back in Anger (1956). Osborne was one of the "angry young men" of the 1950s. I read his play a long time ago. I found his protagonist Jimmy to be cruel, unpleasant, unlikable, unsympathetic. Look Back in Anger is considered a realist play. It followed in a line going back to the nineteenth century, including the naturalism of the nineteenth century. Naturalism and realism are considered literary. I guess we're supposed to find value in works of this type. Realism caught on well in America. One example that has leapt into my mind is The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (1949), another novel that I found to be pretty unpleasant. And just a couple of weeks ago, I read an anthology called Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters: 13 Masterpieces of Black Humor (1962), and I can tell you this is one of the worst books I have ever read. I should have read a science fiction novel instead of this book of "literature."

Unfortunately, themes, styles, and subject matter have gone back and forth between literature and genre fiction. And unfortunately, genre fiction seems to have become too heavily influenced by what is called literature. I think this is chiefly through naturalism, realism, and I guess post-modernism. The sympathies of authors who work in genre fiction seem to have gone over to the outcast, the aberrant, the perverted, the hateful, the murderous, the nihilistic, and so on. Those same authors seem to want to invite us into the horrible places inside themselves and their own psyches, there to join them in all of their decadence, corruption, hatred, and descent. People don't read in order to hate or to be corrupted or dragged down into darknesses, voids, and abysses, or at least they shouldn't. If they do, there is something really seriously wrong with them. They need spiritual help. (It's there.) When we board a craft, we want it to be a great sailing ship (the leaves of a book are like the sails of a ship), not Charon's ferryboat. Or if we go that way, we want an Orpheus to lead us back.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

A Friend

A friend died very recently. I don't yet know what day. I came back earlier this week, late on a rainy and utterly black night to find a terrible message waiting for me. The next morning I drove into a rising and reaching fog. It had been cold overnight. The rain and humidity from the previous night had frozen not in sheets or crusts on the ground but as heavy frost, a strange, almost supernatural, turn in the weather. In the morning, a thick, misty fog, made from the previous night's rain, went up in tendrils, into cold but warming air and a bright sky, into the blue sky of morning after a storm in the night.

I hesitate to write about her here, but the world must know what has happened. I know nothing yet except that she is gone, nothing outside of what a couple of friends have told me. I hadn't seen my friend in a long time, but that was okay. Just knowing that she was in the world was enough. Even if I had never seen her again, knowing that she was still with us would have been enough. I won't name her. This isn't the place for that. I don't want to sully her with this association. After all, the word weird is in the title of my blog (even if I have tried to show that weird is a concept that predates and rises above the level of most weird fiction and science fiction). She came from something higher and finer. The Internet is a lowly and shabby place. It's mostly garbage. And yet here I am still writing about her. I guess I'm trying to make this shabby place into something better. I hope that remembering her will help raise it up.

My friend was a wonderful person. She had a bright and positive personality. The world was a better and happier place with her in it. Now she is gone, taken from us, and it has been diminished. The hole that's left is not just the size and shape of her. It's much bigger than that. And pieces keep falling away, like how a bank is cut and undermined by a fast-flowing river. I feel like something has been taken from inside of me, too. I don't know whether more pieces will go, or if this will end and the cuts will soften and smooth over.

She was a professor of English literature. She specialized in British literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially literature by women and about women, feminism, women's rights, and women's suffrage. She taught us one book about a woman and another by a woman. In her own book she wrote about Joseph Conrad. Recently I wrote about Conrad, too. If I can find a copy of her book, I can see what she wrote about him and about other authors of his time. In a photograph of her, taken in her office, there are books by Conrad on the shelf behind her. I always liked to hear about her research. She traveled to England before the coronavirus, there to look for primary sources. To me it sounded like an adventure. The last time I talked to her was under a great dome.

My friend loved and was excited by literature. It's rare to find someone who loves what you love and cares about what you care about. When you find her, you discover a kindred spirit. Weird fiction and science fiction are fine, but they are mostly just entertainments. In literature, though, there is enormous power, depth, scope, and meaning. Literature is one of our greatest creations, I think, and shows back to us so much about ourselves, our lives, our hearts and minds, the nature of our existence, our relationships with each other, our place in the universe. She saw in literature all of that and wanted others to see it, too. Her love and excitement went out around her like a cloud--a gently forceful and persuasive and inviting cloud. That's one of the reasons I say that the hole that is left in her dying is so much larger than she was in her person.

She was a good teacher. She had enough confidence in herself, in her love for and excitement about literature, most of all in her subject matter to stand in front of a group with an open book in front of her, while theirs were closed, or maybe only half open, and to lead them--to lead us--and to say to us, "Follow me." And we did. But now she's gone and I don't know what we're supposed to do. This feeling is not about the loss of her as a teacher but as a whole and wonderful person. We need her still because we love her. She has gone ahead of us, though, and we will surely all follow those whom we have lost. But maybe once again she has read the book ahead of us and she understands it, or at least she understands it better than we do, and maybe she can lead us again. And we will learn from her and follow.

Nothing that exists passes out of existence. Because she and everyone else who has left us existed, she and they exist. I am certain of that. Her body and spirit have separated from each other. Her body has gone back to the earth, which is where it came from. Her spirit has gone somewhere else, which is where it came from. We will never again see on this earth the people who have left us. But I believe we will all see each other again.

The saying is that journalism is the first draft of history. Maybe grief and sorrow are the first draft in learning how to live without someone whom you have loved--but whom you can always still love, because love, once created, cannot be destroyed. Because love is imperishable.

Terence E. Hanley, Saturday, March 29, 2025.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Weird Tales Scam

Every once in a while I look on the Internet for news of my blog. This isn't really vanity--or not mostly vanity--I just want to see what's going on out there. I don't have any connections to people in weird fiction or science fiction except for the members of our weird fiction book club. I don't know anything about current trends, developments, or controversies. I don't subscribe to any magazines and don't go looking for new fiction. The main reason I ordered Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue, is that it was advertised as the 100th anniversary issue. Now here it is two years later and I'm still writing about the thing.

But other people are, too.

In my most recent Internet search, I came upon an essay called "Pulp Fiction Scholar Savages Jonathan Mayberry's [sic] Weird Tales Fantasy Magazine Revival," by Richard Merritt on the website Fandom Pulse, and dated November 26, 2024. As it turns out, I'm the "pulp fiction scholar" of the title. I guess I don't mind being called a scholar. But I like John Keel's disclaimer: "Not an authority on anything." I don't have an advanced degree. I don't work in academia. I have never had anything published in a scholarly journal. I have never been a speaker or presenter at a conference. I'm not a publisher or editor. I don't know what that makes me. Maybe scholar is it.

So today I would like to write about Mr. Merritt's essay.

I'll start by saying that one of the first courtesies you can extend to another person is to get his name right. Jonathan Maberry, current editor of Weird Tales, seems to have failed in that with one of his contributors, Nicole Sixx, whose name is apparently not Nicola, as it is spelled in his table of contents. But then Mr. Merritt misspelled Mr. Maberry's last name in the very title of his essay, and then mixes correct and incorrect spellings in its main body. Does anybody work with a proofreader or editor these days?

Mr. Merritt's essay starts off well enough when he suggests that the current Weird Tales is a skinsuit. It's hard not to see things that way. Weird Tales looks like Weird Tales and has some of its trappings, but it's mostly an imitation. More accurately, I think, it's a type of exploitation. A lot of people have glommed onto something that they never created and could never have created because they're too small, all for their own purposes and their own gain. It's actually pretty cynical when you think about it. The egregious failure of the current Weird Tales to meet its business obligations is more cynical still. I'll go beyond the word skinsuit: the current Weird Tales is a scam.

I don't have Mr. Merritt's full essay. It's behind a paywall. (My blog is free. Things about my blog you have to pay for.) My friend Nate was kind enough to get it for me, but my version is cut off. I have this clause from Mr. Merritt, though: "Even legacy magazines from the heyday of the pulp era aren't safe from crusaders injecting their tired politics into them [. . .]." If he's referring to Weird Tales #367, I will say that at least Mr. Maberry and his contributors did not inject politics into their magazine (or at least I didn't detect any politics in my reading of it). We can be thankful for that. There is a political issue on the fringes of the magazine, though. I covered that last year. The editor and his authors wisely avoided these otherwise poisonous topics, poisonous and fatal to fiction-writing and the pleasures of reading.

Richard Merritt went through some of what I wrote about the magazine. "Overall," he concluded, "the revival is a mess." Those are his words. Although I wouldn't call it a mess, I would also not praise it very highly, either. Most of it is readable. Some of it is fair to good. None of it is very good or excellent. As I wrote before, probably nothing in here will ever be anthologized, which is far less than you can say about the original Weird Tales and its contemporaries in science fiction. I guess we like to mine the material and culture from the past while putting ourselves above the people who created it. This is presentism in one of its worst forms. Read on . . .

Near the end of his essay, Mr. Merritt showed something that Jonathan Maberry posted on Twitter/X in 2019. Mr. Maberry wrote: "My goal is to find exceptional stories from writers of all kinds. None of the racism, sexism, and homophobia that was once associated with this title." So the goal is not to seek out good and promising writers, regardless of their identitarian qualities, to guide and advise them in their work, or to publish good, enjoyable, memorable, and well-written stories. No, the goal is evidently something else, something less. The focus isn't on what's good but what's bad about the past. And the goal is negative rather than positive. Any adult should know (Jonathan Maberry is sixty-six years old) that negative goals don't work. You have to be for something, not against something else. Anyway, maybe that's where the reference to politics in the first paragraph of Mr. Merritt's essay comes from.

Richard Merritt also quoted from the magazine Cirsova, which wrote, I believe also on Twitter/X: "the guy who's behind the most recent woke relaunch of Weird Tales slapped the Weird Tales logo on his own book and called [it] 'The first Weird tales novel'." I don't know who wrote that and when. In addition to not having any connections to anybody, I don't use X or any other social media. In any case, that quote seems to be from someone called #stolenvalor. That's another fitting phrase, if I'm reading the reference the right way. Mr. Maberry has no claim at all to the label "the first Weird Tales novel." I think what he means actually is that his novel is the first Weird Tales-branded novel. And as we have seen, branding, the use of brandnames, product placement, and the advertising of Weird Tales merchandise seem to be the main activities in the writing and publication of Weird Tales #367. Good writing isn't it.

Skinsuit . . . scam . . . stolen valor. All seem to be accurate in reference to the current Weird Tales. I will say to the current editor and publisher: Let us have our magazine back. At the beginning, in the November issue of 1924, the new editor, Farnsworth Wright declared:

Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and we will be guided by your wishes.

Let us have our magazine back.

-----

Corrected on April 2, 2025. Thanks to Mike for the correction.
Thank you to Nate for a copy of Richard Merritt's essay.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The 100th Anniversary in the San Diego Comic Con Book

As I was going through anniversaries and observances of anniversaries last year, I missed an observance. This one was for the 100th anniversary of Weird Tales, and it was published in the Comic Con International: San Diego 2023 Souvenir Book, which went along with that renowned comic book convention held from July 20 through July 23, 2023. The article is called "Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird," and it was written by the current editor of the magazine, Jonathan Maberry. Mr. Maberry's article is nine pages long and includes a lot of illustrations and photographs. If you read it, you will probably notice the lists. Lists after lists. And after the lists, there are more lists. My complaint from before--lists are not writing--still applies. A second complaint: the use of brandnames, this time in the names of undefined or ill-defined sub-sub-genres of fiction, little pools filled with little fish, including "cosmic horror" and "dark fantasy," as if the use of these brandnames is somehow incantatory. Then there is product placement, more or less an advertisement for the 100th anniversary book, also edited by Mr. Maberry. And then another complaint: a lack of editing. Where was the editor or proofreader of Mr. Maberry's article when he wrote:

Part of the fun of this is working with the writers to discover new ways of crafting tales that do not fit easily into any other magazine's "box" but that whisper to the dark heart of  .

Yes, there really is an unfinished sentence in a professionally written and printed publication. And of course I have already written about this insistence that there is something new in genre fiction, when really there is nothing new at all as far as I can tell, including in the 100th-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, which has on its cover and in its lead story a thirty-five-year-old comic book character.

Next: I continue beating a dead horse.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Anne Forman Ellis (1893-1946)

Travel Writer, Tourist/Traveler, Secretary
Born December 18, 1893, Carrollton, Kentucky
Died June 22, 1946, Leigh Memorial Hospital, Norfolk, Virginia

Anne Elizabeth Forman Ellis was born on December 18, 1893, in Carrolton, Kentucky to Alfred Soward Forman and Jennie Wilson Forman. She was a traveler and tourist who had just one letter in Weird Tales, published one hundred years ago this month. Here it is in its entirety, with an editorial introduction:

This is very gratifying, but sh! not too loud, or we may get some hard knocks. But no; the next letter is even more enthusiastic. It is from Anne Forman Ellis, of Norfolk, Virginia, who writes: "Doubtless many of your readers have perused their recent copies of WEIRD TALES under more difficult conditions or in stranger surroundings or at points farther away than I, but I think that for anyone not a professional traveler I may claim the palm for long-distance commuting in my reading, for I read part of the May-June-July quarterly while on my way from Norfolk to California in July, the rest of it on my return trip a week later, the November number while on my way out again in October, the December number as I returned this month--a total of some 14,500 miles to the three copies. To me the apotheosis of comfort and content is the Pullman berth with its drawn curtains shutting out the world, the lulling rock of the fast train, a box of carefully selected chocolates AND a copy of the newest WEIRD TALES with its delightful shudders."

I'm not sure that I have ever read a better or more fun account of someone reading and enjoying Weird Tales than this. What any of us wouldn't give to be there again in those years, riding a train across America!

Anne Forman Ellis lived in Norfolk, Virginia, for thirty years. She was secretary of Mutual Federal Savings & Loan Association, and before that of the Tidewater Automobile Association. She traveled throughout the United States and wrote on historic and scenic sites in Virginia. She was married to and divorced from (in 1926) Carleton Bliss Ellis. Despite his name, there does not appear to have been any bliss in their marriage, for she sued him for desertion and their time together (and apart) lasted just three years and four months. Despite that, she kept his name and the title Mrs. She died on June 22, 1946, at Leigh Memorial Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. She was just fifty-two years old. Luckily we have her letter.

Anne Forman Ellis' Letter to "The Eyrie"

March 1925

Further Reading
"Mrs. Anne Forman Ellis" (obituary), The Portsmouth (Virginia) Star June 24, 1946, page 8; other obituaries and newspaper items, too.

Anne Forman Ellis (1893-1946)

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Margaret McBride Hoss (1890-1962)

Poet, Lyricist, Author, Librarian
Born November 8, 1890, Nevada, Missouri
Died September 29, 1962, Lake Worth Beach, Florida

Margaret McBride Hoss was born on November 8, 1930, in Nevada, Missouri. That's pronounced Ne-VAY-da for non-natives of the Show Me State. She was the daughter of Judge Granville Snell Hoss (1850-1918) and Julia (McBride) Hoss (1856-1949) and a very distant relative of Daniel Boone. Her brother was also a teller of weird tales. His name was Granville S. Hoss [Junior] (1885-1950), and he wrote five stories published in "The Unique Magazine." They are:

• "The Man Who Thought He Was Dead" (May/June/July 1924)
• "Dr. Jerbot's Last Experiment" (Mar. 1926)
• "The Mist-Monster" (Feb. 1928)
• "The Frog" (June 1930)
• "Out of the Sun" (Dec. 1936)

I have access to various newspaper articles mentioning Hoss, published in Ellington, Missouri, a place I called home for a year in my life.

Margaret McBride Hoss had just one story in Weird Tales, "The Weird Green Eyes of Sari," from March 1925, one hundred years ago this month. Her story is about a fish-woman. "Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft has some similarities to "The Weird Green Eyes of Sari." In Margaret McBride Hoss' story, the man retreats to Kansas, far from any ocean.

Margaret M. Hoss also wrote slogans, song lyrics, poems, and short stories published in American newspapers and magazines from 1924 onward. Following are some of her credits:

• "Over the Hills with Sally" in Motor Life (article, Nov. 1924)
• "Noses" (poem, 1924)
• "Ode to Man" (poem, 1924)
• "That School Girl Complexion" (poem, 1924)
• "What Every Feller Oughter Have" (poem, 1931)
• "Gypsy Woman" (short story, 1936)

Margaret McBride Hoss graduated as valedictorian in a class of twenty ladies from William Woods' College (now William Woods University) in Fulton, Missouri. Her degree was an A.B. and her field was a literary course of study. In 1920, she moved from her home in Cherryvale, Kansas, to Lake Worth, Florida. Cherryvale, by the way, was the birthplace of movie actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985), who was a generation younger than the Hoss children. Margaret M. Hoss married Don Eastin on May 19, 1930, in Florida, and worked as a librarian at Lake Worth City Library until her retirement in 1959. Margaret McBride Hoss Eastin died on September 29, 1962, in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, at age seventy-one.

Margaret McBride Hoss' Story in Weird Tales
"The Weird Green Eyes" of Sari" (Mar. 1925)

Further Reading
Various newspaper articles, poems, and short stories published during her lifetime.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

What is it? What was it?

In "The Horla," by Guy de Maupassant, one of the narrators asks, "What is it?", this invisible being that has afflicted him. His question echoes the title of Fitz-James O'Brien's earlier short story "What Was It? A Mystery," originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in March 1859. "What Was It?" was reprinted in Weird Tales in December 1925 as No. 6 in a series called "Weird Story Reprints." It was reprinted many times before that and has been many times since.

As in "The Horla," the invisible being in O'Brien's story first falls upon the narrator while he is in his bed. The being tries to choke him, but that's where the similarity ends. Fitz-James O'Brien was an Irish writer, but he wrote his story while living in America, and his story is set in America. In crossing over from the Old World to the New, O'Brien seems to have become an American, and his hero is one, too, for he triumphs over his invisible attacker, whereas Maupassant's narrators fall victim to theirs, especially in the second version of 1887. I have written before about the difference between the American hero and his European counterpart. Maupassant's narrators are defeated in their encounters with the Horla. The first is hospitalized. The second is driven nearly insane and decides he must kill himself. O'Brien's narrator subdues his tormenter and keeps it captive until its tragic death. Although it was written in Antebellum times, "What Was It?" is very much like an American science fiction monster movie from 1950s.

There are imperfect parallels between the American hero and the triumphant science-fictional hero versus the European protagonist and the defeated, humiliated weird-fictional protagonist. O'Brien's narrator is an example of the former. Maupassant's narrators are examples of the latter. I have written about that before, too. You can read part of what I wrote in "Weird Tales & Weird Fiction-Part Two," from January 24, 2023, by clicking here. It's one of my favorite entries in this blog. We'll see what you think of it. Anyway, I find the difference between these two stories and their authors to be striking. They are, I think, a simple distillation of the difference between the American and European ways of looking at the world and a simple example of why America remains the indispensable nation. Without us, the world would be overrun by invisible monsters, including the invisible monsters of the mind.

An illustration by Lawrence for "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien, from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949.

P.S. Fitz-James O'Brien died by violence in our Civil War. Guy de Maupassant died by self-destruction. There are of course Americans who destroy themselves. It's a way of life not only for us but also for all people everywhere. This is just a too-obvious example of the difference between an American writer and his European counterpart. Ernest Hemingway combined these two ways of dying, for he died by violent self-destruction. Will Rogers famously said, "We'll be the first nation in the world to go to the poor house in an automobile." We're probably also the first people to go the morgue along the barrel of a gun.

I should point out that American literature began in part with a discussion of the invisible, with Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, published in 1693. Here is a passage from Chapter II that reads like the attacks of the invisible beings in O'Brien's and Maupassants' stories:

An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements: and the Houses of the Good People there are fill'd with the doleful Shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural. After the Mischiefs there Endeavoured, and since in part Conquered, the terrible Plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its Progress into some other places, where other Persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled. These our poor Afflicted Neighbours, quickly after they become Infected and Infested with these Dæmons, arrive to a Capacity of Discerning those which they conceive the Shapes of their Troublers [. . .]. 

That sounds like O'Brien's narrator and his friends making a plaster casting of his invisible attacker: he discerns and conceives the shape of his troubler.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley